Coho Photography

Just back from 4 days freezing my butt off on the lower Salmon river between Pine Bar and Heller Bar on the Snake. Images, as usual, can be found HERE. Sorry there aren’t more, I spent most of my time trying to keep people from dying of hypothermia.

We began the trip on Saturday morning with some rental vehicle confusion. We had some confusion also in filling our water seeing as all of the taps in Grangville seemed to have frozen solid the night before. Eventually a nice woman at a gas station helped up fill our water jugs and we roared down to the put-in at Pine Bar. On the water by 4 and to Packer’s Creek by 6 or so. The evening quickly plummeted to somewhere around 10 degrees, one fisherman went as far as to claim a low of 5 degrees Saturday evening. We stayed warm though with two delicious quiches (salmon, bacon and spinach!) The morning came along with one 7 gallon water jerry frozen solid, luckily the ones in the raft only froze on the top so we could break one open to get some coffee water going. We finally got on the water mid-morning and floated down to Billy Creek for our second evening with uneventful lines at Snow Hole and China. A deliciously undercooked lasagna dinner later and we sent the group to bed wearing every ounce of clothing they possessed. Monday started out cloudy but eventually opened up for a bit in the afternoon. The group definitely got the coldest this day, especially during the final 6 miles of hellaciously windy flatwater down to Cottonwood on the Snake. We finally made it to camp and got the group warmed up with an enormous bonfire on the beach. Luckily for us the Snake was moving along pretty nicely with 21,000 CFS coming out of Hells Canyon- almost enough to make up for the 20mph upstream winds and incessant strings of jetsled hullabaloos! Our last day got us to a really wonderful destination, the 410 diner in Lewiston. Happiness prevailed once we got the heat blasting in our truck. A few hours of driving and de-rigging later and I was off to the library for 10 epic hours of paper writing. Lesson- I would always rather freeze floating down a river than write a paper in a stuffy and overheated library. The shower felt pretty good though.